We’re listening in on the biggest conversations in the OpenStack community and clueing you in to the latest. In this week’s compilation: examining the future of OpenStack, the travel grant application for the Paris summit, and the OpenStack talent gap.

There’s a lot going on in the OpenStack community and it’s easy to get lost in the noise. We’ve collected the top conversations you need to know about this week. From the latest OpenStack resources to news about users, we share the content you need to stay up to date.

"As we look ahead to whatever comes next, it’s important to note that in the life of any popular open source project there are key points and critical junctures and I think we might have reached one. What does OpenStack want to be as it grows into a more mature project and just who is going to define that?" — Ron Miller on Tesora’s blog

"The betterment of the world relies on innovation, and collaboration is one of the key ingredients to accomplish this goal. Open source methodologies, which have collaboration at their core, are well-poised to be an integral part of this universal push for innovation." — Harish Pillay in ZDNet

"The OpenStack project continues to be something of a lightning rod and also something of a dichotomy in the industry." — Jay Lyman in LinuxInsider discussing the results of the latest 451 Research report on the status of OpenStack

"OpenStack talent is a rarified discipline. To be good with OpenStack, you need to be a systems engineer, a great programmer but also really comfortable working with hardware. You need to understand how the infrastructure works under the covers." — Josh McKenty, CTO of Piston Cloud in CRN